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Removing "what", limiting "where," and focusing on "when" limits what can really be done in the main stages. The minimal "storytelling" that wraps the main game suggests where the developers wanted the focus to be: in the experimentation and design of the Workshop and in the sharing of the Community. That other stuff? Just a tech demo.
Despite the off-putting steampunk aesthetic, the weird roster of fictional and non-fictional characters, and the relative shallowness of the strategic elements, Code Name: S.T.E.A.M. doesn't grow tiresome.
It's essentially a glorified DLC pack of new levels, plus a level editor for folks who want to make their own murder rooms. The exact people who Dennaton Games were supposedly condemning in their first title are, apparently, the exact audience of people whose money they would like to take, again and again. I guess they figure those people like rape and torture, too, plus more methodical killing. Maybe they're right—but it's too bad, since it comes at the expense of making a game that has anything whatsoever to offer beyond phoned-in grindhouse schlock.
Guilty Gear Xrd – SIGN rules in so many ways. They announced a new Street Fighter, I hear, but I do not care. Guilty Gear is a good time. I love fighting games and I will always hype ones that are good but Guilty Gear is special. Not too many games make me feel like I'm having as much fun as these do. Other games are more popular and other games are easier to learn, but only Guilty Gear is this happy to be here.
Ultimately, I found myself charmed by the game's premise, and happy to skip the occasional boring "historical" cut-scenes entirely in order to spend more time with my cute clique. The compelling combat mechanics made up for the tedious administrative tasks of setting up spells and weapons for my huge party. I could imagine a younger version of myself with more free time—and a higher proclivity towards digital teen crushes—getting lost in the world of chocobo breeding and conversations with feisty Moogles. In many ways, the game serves as a decent introduction to the tropes and aesthetics of latter-day Final Fantasy games; it's too bad that many of the cut-scenes lay on the lore too thick, or I'd be able to recommend the title to new players with no reservations.
DMC: Definitive Edition puts a decent game back in the limelight with some additional content that launches it up above decent and into great. Also there's a moment where a demon yells "fuck you" and Dante yells "fuck you!" and then the demon yells "FUCK YOUUUU!!!" and now you get to experience that in glorious HD resolution at sixty frames per second in the year of our Lord two thousand and fifteen.
And Hardline could be better. There are shades of it here, now and then. Games in general can be better. But they never will be until we raise our expectations. When even the best of us feels limited to writing "narrative rosaries strung with beads of pure chaos," how do the least of us stand a chance?
The heroes in film noir aren't flawless—they stumble through the story, rarely win a fight, and often pay a heavy price in the end. At least they try, though, and the same can be said for White Night.
Nostalgia is similarly addictive, but Verge's confidence sees it through the challenge of invoking Metroid better than just about anyone who's tried before it. It copies more than aesthetic and ambiguous notions about variety, and the specificity is what matters. It's not a perfect match, and the absence of a powerful lead leaves an indelible mark on the experience.
It is rare that I finish a game, especially one that's more than 6 hours, and immediately want to restart and play through it all again. Bloodborne is a deeply challenging game set in a fantastically realized gothic nightmare, an adventure of the highest quality for those willing to undergo the game's trial by fire and push past the technical hiccups.
Life Is Strange has a few more episodes to prove me wrong—and as always, I sure hope they do. They still have time, but unlike Max's, it's running out.
Considered on its own, Starships is a little tactical treat. Give it a few hours of your day and you'll be lifted by its modular pieces and its battlefield puzzles. But do not linger: It simply does not have the strength to punch through gravity and carry you to the stars.
Believe it or not my biggest problem with The Sims 4 Get to Work isn't that my bakery was a bust. It's that pretty much everything it adds to the game is one-sided. As far as I can tell I can't send my sims to the hospital or the police station or the lab to look around. It's interesting enough to work in these locations, but how much more interesting could it be with outward-facing interactions?
Paperbound's restrictions impelled me to seek out my friends and spend time with them and that is a worthy, if comparatively inconvenient, experience for a game to foster. If you can manage to wrangle up enough controllers and in-the-flesh human beings, a jolly experience awaits you. Otherwise—maybe skip buying the game and just go hang out with your friends.
I wish the developers had given the more interesting elements of the game more time to breathe. I wish Pneuma had been a little less hasty—a little more interested in conveying why exactly we should care about his rushed philosophical ponderings than racing to solve high school thought experiments. In a game about creation and existence and perception, I'd have loved some sense of what it would actually feel like to be birthed from the void into a world that was, for all intents and purposes, yours.
Titan Souls is an example of a game that successfully uses nostalgia as a jumping off point and not as a central reason to exist. The name and art style might make it seem too familiar, but if you can play through that you'll see it quickly establishes its own identity. It's still a bit of a novelty, but at least it fully commits to that novelty, much like you'll probably commit yourself to defeating every titan once this game sinks its hooks into you.
At the end of the day, The Handsome Collection contains more Borderlands than I would ever want to play, and the likelihood that you will enjoy it or not has more to do with your being a fan of the series already or not. It is an immense amount of gameplay "value" for what you will spend on the collection, and if you're looking for something to kick a few hundred hours into, there are less interesting games you could be playing.
Pillars of Eternity is an epic that either meets or exceeds all of my lofty expectations. Minutes turned to hours, hours turned to evenings and evenings turned to days as I immersed myself in the wonderful world that Obsidian has created. You must gather your party before venturing forth—a dangerous and exciting world awaits you in Pillars of Eternity.
Mortal Kombat X is fascinating in how parts of it seemingly want to get away from the nasty elements that made the series a household name and yet the gravitational pull of legacy and expectation is too strong. Mortal Kombat X is, in the end, no matter how much it wants to persuade you otherwise, just another Kombat game. It also happens to be one of the best ones in spite of itself but it's difficult for me to shake the feeling that Mortal Kombat has plateaued and that there's nowhere left to go without changing the fundamentals of the series in a radical way.
Broken Age's second act is kind of a slog, but it's possible I should take a lesson from its crying character: When I hope for something extremely strange and specific, I shouldn't complain if I actually get it.